One Man - One View

South Viet Nam Oct. 1969 - Sept. 1970

Chapter Three

Camp Tien Sha, as you can see in the map above, was located some distance from the supply base (called Depot on this map). It housed around 6,000 Navy personal. You will need to refer back to this map for other Da Nang locations. Supplies came into I Corps via ships, which usually offloaded their cargo at the Deep Water Pier. If all of the piers were busy, supplies would be lifted in cargo nets from ships anchored in the harbor (by chopper) and flown to one of the many chopper pads in the area, to be moved on by truck. Supplies offloaded on the piers were moved by truck to whatever part of the supply base they needed to go to. Much of our stuff (cold and frozen) came right from the piers in Sea/Land vans. We got to and from work by hitching rides on military vehicles traveling the road between the two bases, riding the bus or (if we were lucky) getting a ride on the truck assigned to our division. And as noted earlier, if we were under a special alert status (like during Tet – more on it later), we’d have to ride in the cattle cars.

NSA Da Nang supported all of the military services, including the Marines, Army and Air Force, in I Corps. Each local command and the outlying bases would send their supply people to us regularly for whatever they needed. It was our job, as Storekeepers, to distribute those supplies to them (and make sure they didn’t take more then they were supposed to). To handle the huge volume of supplies, we had teams of Vietnamese civilian laborers who did most of the heavy work. They generally knew more about what they were doing then we did.